1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to the field of contact centers, and in particular to routing service requests in a contact center. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to a contact center routing service requests based at least in part upon passive skill certification of agents.
2. Description of the Related Art
Enterprises may be generally defined as organizations that provide products, which can include goods and/or services. Enterprises include private and public businesses, as well as governmental, educational and charitable institutions. Users, purchasers and consumers of products (including potential users, purchasers and consumers) often have questions regarding products, product usage and product cost. For example, a prospective student may have questions about a particular course offered by an educational institution, a purchaser of a computer system may have questions regarding configuring hardware and/or software of the computer system, or a company may have questions about technical specifications of a contract that has been let or is open for bids. Such examples are not intended to be exhaustive, but rather to illustrate the wide diversity of questions that may be received by enterprises.
To address such questions, enterprises frequently establish or contract with one or more other enterprises to establish a contact center to handle at least the routing of service requests submitted by users, purchasers and consumers, and perhaps provision of one or more services in response to the service requests. In current contact centers, a high percentage of service requests are selectively routed in an automated fashion to agents each providing a set of predefined services. For example, a contact center may employ an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) application that, in response to receipt of a service request, presents diagnostic questions and then routes the service request to an agent having the appropriate skill set based upon the answers provided to the diagnostic questions.